There will be different arrays for each school year, but no array will mix years such as fre, soph.

My issue is that I need to sort this array by the way seasons happen in school (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer). I tried using uksort but my code there actually accomplishes nothing since it'd sort the same way regardless.

You're really close. Actually, uksort is doing exactly what you're asking it to do, stripping the grade designation, and sorting alphabetically by the second word. What you need it do is a bit different - you're asking it to sort by season. You're going to have to write your own comparison for them, based on the sort order you want to see. You could use the solution given by mr-sk, or you could do something like this: